I'm currently on an oil drilling ship several hundred kilometres off the
coast of Newfoundland awaiting the imminent arrival of 65-knot winds,
so I'm feeling a bit pre-aeolian myself.
This word immediately reminded me of this video.

Email of the Week (Brought to you by One Up! - Not for the faint of head.)

The word "aeolian" is used often in a musical context. A major builder
of pipe organs of the 20th century in the US was Aeolian-Skinner.
Pipe organs are basically
powered by wind. The Aeolian Harp is also powered by wind and is not meant
to be played by a person. And Aeolian is one of the modes used in music. The
modes all bear Greek names such as Phrygian and Lydian. The Aeolian mode is
what would be called today A-minor, all played on white notes on the piano.

The aeolion harp was used by the British romantic poets as a metaphor for
the mind swept by the external world (or ideas) by an external cause, in some
usages the ultimate cause was God. Coleridge used the image in several poems
(poetic utterances = music of harp) including "The Aeolian Harp". Coleridge,
at least, found a philosophical basis for this in the works of both Berkeley
and Hartley. These were also the names given to his first two children.

Lawrence Swan devoted a good portion of his life studying what he called The
Aeolian Biome. In his words:

I have discovered the most precarious ecosystem in the world. It is a biome
beyond the alpine or the tundra where life lives on the manna donated by
the wind. This Aeolian Biome is not often included in textbooks since few
biologists do their research up beyond 20,000 feet, tolerating cold hands
and fierce storms."

Swan's work is partially documented in the book Tales of the Himalaya,
Mountain 'N Air Books, La Cresenta, CA 2000.

Virga is indeed the centuries-old name for streaks of precipitation hanging
below a cloud. But the more recent explanation that the streaks don't
extend to the ground because of evaporation is false (at least for the
vast majority of observations of virga). The streaks are snow; the snow
melts; the resulting rain streaks do reach the ground; from a distance
the rain is far more transparent than snow and so seems to vanish leaving
the snow (virga) to hang aloft. Be that as it may, the basic problem lies
with words or definitions with embedded explanations -- they are usually
wrong. Dictionaries should stick to descriptions and leave explanations
to others. Virga is as its etymology suggests: precipitation streaks below
a cloud. The explanation of why it appears this way is another matter.
For details, see: Is virga rain that evaporates before reaching the ground?
by Alistair B. Fraser and Craig F. Bohren. Monthly Weather Review. (1992) 120, 8, 1565-71.

Alistair Fraser
Emeritus Professor of Meteorology
Penn State University

I used to teach calligraphy classes at Ghost Ranch, one of Georgia
O'Keeffe's homes in New Mexico and source of much of the inspiration for
her paintings. We would sit on the porch and watch the virga, known to
the Native Americans as "walking rain", travel across the desert.

From: Beth Surdut (info bethsurdut.com)
Subject: virga

Virga -- a new word for our enchanting skies. Here in New Mexico, people say,
"It's always raining somewhere, just doesn't hit the ground."

The Philippines has been experiencing swings from El Niño to La
Niña -- droughts to heavy rain or typhoons. In September and October last
year, we were plagued with La Niña, resulting in catastrophic floods. In
the past five months, we've had dry weather -- El Niño -- resulting in
parched rice fields and dangerously low levels of water in our dams.

Coincidentally, this came a few days after Oklahoma City received record rain
fall: 11 inches in 7 hours at my house. I think I will remember 'pluvial'!
Soggy times.

From: Bhavna Jha (bhavnajha gmail.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--nimbus
Def: 1. A rain cloud. 2. A halo or aura around the head of a person depicted in a piece of art.

JK Rowling and Harry Potter shall be recurrent in our responses. The
Nimbus 2000 was Harry's first broomstick (see specifications).
This tiny little fact made sleepy Geography classes so much more bearable.

From: Carsten Kummerow (carsten.kummerow web.de)
Subject: Nimbus

In Germany, the term nimbus is used to refer to an aura of authority,
integrity, or secret knowledge which surrounds a person or institution.
More often than not it implies that the nimbus prevents us from judging
objectively and that the assumed qualities are not really present. This
nicely reflects both meanings of nimbus in the sense that halos can cloud
our judgement.

From: Kathy Koons (kathykoons mail.com)
Subject: nimbus

Today's word fits your theme for the week as well as the theme here in the
Orlando area. Today [Jun 18, 2010], Universal Studios officially opened The
Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Harry was given a Nimbus 2000 broom when he
joined his house Quidditch team. I can see applications of both definitions
of the word!

From: John Loder (kouj60 yahoo.com)
Subject: Etymology of nimbus

Here's another descendant of the Indo-European root nebh-. There is an
instrument called a nephelometer and an associated area of scientific study
called nephelometry. The broad area is the quantitative determination of
particle density in a solution (cloudiness of the solution) and the
nephelometer does the trick.

The way I see it, weather is a state of mind. How gray one feels inside has little to do with clouds or what the thermometer reads."

This reminds me of Melville:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a
damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral
I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me,
that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately
stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off --
then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."
[Moby Dick, page 1]

Actually, the external weather has more to do with mood than you allow,
consider SAD or seasonal affective disorder, a kind of winter depression
and summer hypomania especially prevalent in the Scandanavian countries,
but also at a lesser rate here in the US.

Robert R Newport, MD
Psychiatrist

From: Linda Owens (lindafowens netzero.net)
Subject: weather

Ask anyone with arthritis and they will tell you they feel the low pressure
in their joints. It runs in my family, plus I got it after a series of
sports injuries in my 40s and 50s. So the glumness on people's faces may
be from the weather or lack of sleep or pain or meds.

From: Richard Bailey (hms-rose comcast.net)
Subject: weather

Aboard square-rigged sailing ships, where the standing watch has little
opportunity to cower 'indoors' or belowdecks during any kind of driving
rain, blinding snow, concussive thunder, howling wind, &c., &c., one can
only clip one's harness into the jackline, attempt to smile and encourage
(or aggravate) the crew with a fragment of John Ruskin, "There's no such
thing as bad weather, just different kinds of good weather."

From: F. Carr (fcarr alum.mit.edu)
Subject: Re: aeolian

"One could find cheerful people in an icy place like Alaska..."

Having grown up in Fairbanks, Alaska --- an unofficial suburb of Seattle ---
I would like to kindly point out that the state is more than twice the size
of Texas. Due to this hyper-exuberance of geography, it is quite possible
in Alaska to get every imaginable sort of weather (icy or otherwise!) AT
THE SAME TIME.

As a University of Washington graduate I cannot agree with you more about
Seattle weather and weather as a state of mind.

I grew up and now live in upstate NY, and as I have told many NY state
friends over the years, in Seattle it thinks about raining for a long,
long time and when it does rain, often it is a drizzle. As a graduate
student at UW I often walked to my clinical assignment in sport coat
and tie, enjoying the drizzle and dodging slugs.

Word of warning on Jeff Sconyers's casual use of the word "wankers". I
can imagine many subscribers in the UK spluttering their morning cuppa
out when reading this. It is a rather more grave swear word than our US
cousins appear to understand.

It was notoriously used in the UK during an episode of The Simpsons
a few years
back, at the usual 6pm timeslot, and received quite a few complaints at
the time.

(It should also be noted that this is not written in response to USA's
extraordinarily fortunate equaliser on Saturday!)

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

There are some who only employ words for the purpose of disguising their
thoughts. -Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)